Give graduates decent jobs, not brooms

June 5, 2010

Give graduates decent jobs, not brooms

Attain job generation through national industrialization

Militant youths led by ANAKBAYAN held a picket today at the DOLE office in Intramuros, Manila to denounce the proposals put forward by the Arroyo Administration to address the growing joblessness in the country.

“This March, around 517,000 graduates will be walking straight into the waiting arms of unemployment and poverty. While this is something that happens every year, this year is a record-breaker for unemployment due to the global economic crisis” ANAKBAYAN National Chairperson Ken Ramos said.

Ramos further said that Arroyo’s latest proposal to draft jobless youths as street cleaners is ‘a cheap publicity stunt’. “Can Arroyo give all 10.7 million unemployed Filipinos a secure job with decent wages as streetsweepers? Such a proposal will end up as another job-generation failure upon previous failures.”

ANAKBAYAN National Chairperson Ken Ramos berated the government’s job-generation programs as “either knee-jerk failures or attempts which heighten our economy’s over-dependence on foreign companies and make the employment climate more vulnerable to the negative impacts of the global economic crisis.”

Ramos cited several examples of Arroyo’s measures to stem the growing unemployment that are doomed to fail: retraining of the labor force for foreign export, export processing zones, and call center/BPO (business process outsourcing) enterprises. “All of these rely on foreign demand. As the US and other foreign countries decide to cut their losses due to the recession, more companies pull-out of our country and massive lay-offs occur. With the national economy being run mostly by the ”

According to Ramos, it is time for people to consider the economic policy of national industrialization to generate stronger industries and employment for the people. “National industrialization creates industries focused towards local demand. This in turn creates stable jobs for Filipinos, unlike those created by export-oriented industrialization,” Ramos concluded. ###